Transactions of the Philological Society Volume 109 109112

LANGUAGES OF EARLY BRITAIN: INTRODUCTION

By STEPHEN LAKER and PAUL RUSSELL
Kyushu University and University of Cambridge
This thematic issue arose from a one-day symposium carrying the same title held at
Manchester University on 21 May 2009. Papers by Paul Russell and Katrin Thier stem from
the event, while those of Michael Benskin and David Parsons were later offered on
invitation.1 With such a vast theme, the four papers can offer just a sample of current research
into the languages and the linguistic situation in Britain in the first millennium. Nonetheless,
we believe the papers are representative of current research trends and together, with their
varied yet interrelated themes, manage to cover considerable ground. The contributions focus
especially on the linguistic impacts of the Roman and Anglo-Saxon invasions and settlements,
though later contacts involving Irish and Old Norse also come up for discussion in the final
paper. All papers therefore bear a resemblance, in that they each deal with issues relating to
language contact and multilingualism in early Britain; however, the fields explored and the
questions addressed by the authors differ considerably. The following topics are explored: the
use of Latin in Roman Britain as viewed from the place-name evidence (Parsons), the
influence of Latin on Brittonic morphology (Russell), Brittonic influence on verbsubject
agreement in English dialects (Benksin), and how loanwords reflect the technological transfer
at different periods (Thier).
The first two papers, by Parsons and Russell, consider the linguistic impact of Latin in
Britain during almost four centuries of Roman rule (ca. AD 43410). As both authors make
clear, opinions about the nature and use of Latin in Roman Britain have changed significantly
in recent decades. Earlier suggestions that British Latin was more conservative in terms of its
phonology than in other parts of the Empire have largely been discredited. Newly discovered
inscriptions, in particular curse tablets in vernacular language, have added weight to this view,
and it is now argued that British Latin shared several characteristics with the Latin of Gaul.
Although Latin was undoubtedly spoken by many citizens in Roman Britain, some scholars
have reasoned that Latin probably became the main vernacular language in the lowland areas
of the South-East, which are known to have been intensely Romanised both archaeologically
and culturally.
Deducing the multilingual setting of late Roman Britain is complicated firstly by the fact
that Latin was the only language committed to writing and, secondly, because of the rapidity
of the Anglo-Saxon settlement from the mid-fifth century on, with its early epicenter in the
South and East, which eradicated virtually all traces of the earlier linguistic situation.
Substantial numbers Latin loanwords, including items of basic vocabulary, as attested in
mediaeval Welsh, Cornish and Breton, are possibly suggestive of widespread Latin use in
Roman Britain; more controversially, a not insubstantial number of early Latin loanwords in
Old English could point in this direction too, but firm conclusions about language
demographics cannot be drawn from loanword evidence alone. Recently, however, Peter
Schrijver (2002, 2007) has opened up a new avenue in the debate, arguing that the influence of
Latin on Brittonic was not limited to the lexicon but went to the very heart of its structural
1
Three papers from the event have already appeared elsewhere (see Blom 2009, Laker 2010, Trudgill 2010); papers
presented by Guto Rhys and Philip A. Shaw are still in the process of being written up as a Ph.D. dissertation and a
book project respectively.

The authors 2011. Transactions of the Philological Society The Philological Society 2011. Published by Blackwell Publishing,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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organisation. He provides numerous examples from the domain of phonology, as well as

some suggestions of morphosyntactic influence, which, if they are owed to contact, are
difficult to conceive unless Latin had gained widespread usage in late Roman Britain.
Such new insights call for us to reconsider the influence of Latin in other linguistic domains,
and Parsons ventures to do so in his study of Roman and post-Roman place-name evidence.
His contribution begins with a judicious survey of past research on the use of Latin in Britain
and follows with an authoritative evaluation of what the place-name evidence can and cannot
reveal about the Romano-British linguistic scene. His study of place-names, which
incidentally merits comparison with a recent survey of personal-names in Roman Britain
(see Mullen 2007, Mullen & Russell 2009), probes among other things the evidence for Latin
place-names in both Roman and Post-Roman sources, the productive use of Latin elements in
Old English place-names, and the phonological form of both Latin and Brittonic elements.
The number of Latin place-names is shown to be modest, when compared to the situation in
Gaul, but mere numbers of place-names, as Parsons points out, are not a reliable gauge for
calibrating the degree of Romanisation, linguistic or otherwise, since it is unlikely that
bilingualism or language shift would lead to a spate of renaming activity only for new
buildings and settlements would such be expected. Of special interest, however, is the
productive use of some Latin elements (in contrast to Brittonic elements) in Old English
place-names of southern England, which may well point towards more widespread use of
Latin. Parsons shows convincingly, however, that place-names provide strong evidence that
Brittonic could not have been completely given up in the Lowland zone, because Brittonic
place-names even in south-eastern Britain show the effects of several Brittonic sound changes
that all experts agree occurred towards the very end of the Roman period. Thus, whatever the
increasing role of Latin was in the Lowland zone, place-names would indicate that Brittonic
also continued to be spoken there into the fourth and fifth centuries.
Further clues as to the impact of Latin in Roman Britain are presented by Russell on the
basis of morphosyntactic traits of Brittonic which share a strong resemblance with those in
Latin. In doing so, Russell investigates a number of features proposed by others (cf. Schrijver
2002: 967) and quite deliberately sets the methodological bar very high. Although several
other Latin influences could be taken into consideration, the development of compound
prepositions and the formation of a pluperfect tense in Brittonic stand as credible candidates
for contact. In these examples we see the formation of new structures and grammatical
categories using native Brittonic elements but based on the Latin model. These examples
would therefore suggest that Latin was spoken among the wider populace in late Roman
Britain and was not simply the preserve of a small minority.
The alternating directions of the results of Parsons and Russells results are intriguing:
Parsons paper weakens Schrijvers position that Latin had become the main or only language
on the streets of Lowland Britain, yet Russells might be seen to strengthen it. These two
papers should not, however, be considered simply as reactions to Schrijvers work; as Russell
points out, the features discussed in both his paper and Parsons could usefully be examined in
the light of the various competing theories of language contact in early Britain. It seems that
more thought must go into the question of how the phonological and morphological features
entered Brittonic, on which Russell provides some preliminary exploration. One suggestion
has been that, following the Anglo-Saxon settlements, many speakers who spoke either Latin
or a heavily Romanised variety of Brittonic from the more heavily populated Lowland zone
moved into the Highland zone of the North and West, which had knock-on effects on the
varieties there spoken. Another scenario would admit a situation of steady bilingualism over a
longer period in late Roman Britain, whereby Latin morphosyntactic and phonological
features steadily permeated into Brittonic from Romanised centres in a wave-like manner.
How such features entered Brittonic, must ultimately be revealed from a closer examination of

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the features themselves in relation to what is known and continues to be ascertained about the
mechanisms of language contact and language change. The evidence so far suggests that
Romanisation was well under way, but that any process of language shift from Brittonic to
Latin was not as advanced or complete in Lowland Britain as it was in Gaul at the time this
is explainable from the fact that Britain was at greater range from the heart of the Empire and
did not fall under Roman rule until a later date.
The two remaining papers focus mainly on later situations of language contact involving
Anglo-Saxons and share a more northerly compass. The subject of Benskins paper is the wellknown and highly distinctive present tense verbsubject agreement pattern found in Northern
English and Scottish dialects since the mediaeval period: the so-called Northern Subject Rule.
Central to his study is the question of whether Brittonic had any influence on its development,
as has been suggested previously by a number of scholars. Such an explanation is viewed as
slightly controversial, because it has long been presumed that Brittonic had little influence on
English. However, in the last decade scholars have reasoned that the dearth of Brittonic
loanwords in English that initially led some scholars to dismiss the possibility of Brittonic
influences on English is not decisive. Instead, many linguists now argue that, similar to
contemporary situations of adult language learning, foreign accent and grammar will be the
most perpetual reminders of first language encroaching on the second language (see
discussions in Filppula et al. 2008, 2009). What Benskin makes abundantly clear in his
contribution is that a clear grasp of the historical data is the first requirement for any credible
analysis or position of contact.
While an obvious parallelism with the Northern Subject Rule and the verbal agreement
system in Brittonic languages has been noted before, linguists have not attempted to work out
how such an agreement system might have developed out of the inflectional paradigms of
early English. In this particular instance, this point is crucial, for we have to do here not with
a simple calqued construction, but rather with a systematic agreement alteration which, if it
did emerge through contact, must have arisen out of the verbal inflectional system of (Pre-)
Old English, which, as Benskin explains, was subject to alternating forms too. Instead of
considering the historical data, researchers have instead assembled all manner of typological
and theoretical arguments to argue their case. Benskin, in contrast, investigates the matter in a
direct scientific manner, marshalling the facts and running through all possible scenarios
before making any final assessment. Starting out as a critic, he demonstrates that nothing
rules out such a contact scenario with Brittonic; his derivation, however, is very different from
those suggested by previous scholars, who based their reconstructions on later evidence.
Clearly, Benskins paper could have some bearing on the conclusions drawn in Parsons
and Russells papers pertaining to the ideas of a possible HighlandLowland linguistic divide.
Researchers past (Jackson 1963: 60) and present (Coates 2010: 443, Laker 2010: 252) have
sometimes suspected a northern bias to Brittonic influence on English; hence, the geography
of the Northern Subject Rule could bolster such claims. While not ruling out this possibility,
Benskin is cautious about entertaining speculations and instead points out that a variety of
other factors could equally explain why the split verbsubject agreement pattern is found in
the North (e.g. differences in the inflectional morphology of [Pre-]Old English dialects could
help explain matters). For Benskin, such speculations are at present secondary to the need of
evaluating putative contact-features on an individual basis and specifying the path by which
such features could have entered English. In future, scholars will then be able to attempt a
synthesis of all significant findings about possible Brittonic influence in all domains of the
English language, to see whether any telling connections between the findings actually emerge.
The final article, by Thier, comes at the questions raised in this issue from a different
direction in that it is concerned not with a single contact situation involving Brittonic and
Latin or Brittonic and Old English, but with the movement of Germanic and Celtic loanwords

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in early Britain at different periods. Thiers special interest is with seafaring technology and its
associated terminology all very pertinent to Britain throughout its history. With reference to
formal evidence from spellings and their phonological interpretation, along with details
concerning the documentation of various terms for vessels and rigging in mediaeval works,
Thier is able to chart the etymological development of the terms in English and, where
relevant, in other Germanic languages too. In addition, Thier also draws on the distribution
of particular vessels in terms of archaeological remains and, in some cases, modern
descendants in Britain and on the Continent, sometimes with the effect of showing how
changes to the craft themselves and associated semantic developments are reflected in both the
archaeological and historical records. Through her detailed and perceptive analysis, Thier
thus takes us beyond the etymologies of the words and reveals to us what the various craft
and equipment may tell us about linguistic and cultural interchanges right up to those
involving Irish and Norse at the end of the first millennium, in which a glimpse into the
multilingual setting of early mediaeval Northumbria is provided.
Together the papers in this issue show how in different ways language is being used to
illuminate the early centuries of British history, about which comparatively little detailed
historical documentation exists and little else is likely ever to be found. New ways of
processing and interpreting the data are helping to advance current knowledge and, at the
same time, fresh information and insights are being gained from new archaeological finds,
occasionally bearing linguistic information. The findings from the papers in this issue may not
be as tangible as those of archaeologists or as grand as those claimed by some geneticists, yet
together we believe they advance current research, and we hope they will provide an incentive
for more progress to be made.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Professor David Denison and Dr Alexander Rumble of the University of
Manchester for help in organising the Languages of Early Britain Symposium, and the Brook
Symposium Fund and the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures for providing financial
support. Thanks are due to the editor, Paul Rowlett, and the Council of the Philological Society for
supporting the project and the external referees for providing valuable and constructive commentary on
the papers.

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